Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (4 page)

‘MAD’ DAN MORGAN

T
he bushranger Dan Morgan was called Mad Dan because of his frightening mood swings. One minute he would be charming, the next he would lose his temper and shoot someone. The man was scary!

It’s possible that he had a mental illness. We will never know.

Mad Dan was born John Fuller in New South Wales, 1830, the son of George Fuller and Mary Owen. When he was two, he was adopted by a man called John Roberts, who looked after him till he was seventeen. ‘Dan Morgan’ was just one of many aliases he took on during his life.

Dan worked as a stockman until 1854, when he left for the Castlemaine goldfields in Victoria. Perhaps he decided that robbing other people of their hard-earned money was easier than earning it himself, because he was soon breaking the law. He went to jail for armed robbery. He served only six years of his twelve-year sentence, released early for good behaviour, but Dan Morgan hadn’t learned his lesson.

He returned to New South Wales. There, after a short time as a horse-breaker, Dan helped himself to a valuable horse. The horse’s owner chased and shot him, wounding him. Morgan escaped to an area near the Victorian border, from which he could rob people in northern Victoria.

By mid-1863, Dan Morgan was a full-time bushranger. He committed many armed robberies. In August, he attacked a shepherd called Haley, whom he thought had informed on him. Haley survived the attack, but because of this, the New South Wales government put a 200 pounds reward on Morgan’s head. It would be much bigger by the time he was killed.

The first murder we know for sure that he committed was of an innocent station overseer, John McLean. John worked on a station called Round Hill. In June 1864, Morgan came visiting. The terrified workers were rounded up. Morgan demanded rum. Now drunk, he accidentally shot at himself when he was about to ride off. Thinking someone else was attacking him, he threatened to kill the station manager, Sam Weston. However, he only shot Weston’s hand, then ordered John McLean to ride for a doctor.

Suddenly it occurred to him that McLean might bring the police, so Morgan rode after him and shot him from behind.

Next, he killed a trooper called Maginnity, whose partner, Churchley, rode off and left him. Churchley was sacked for cowardice, but what he did is understandable. Anyone who had Mad Dan Morgan waving a gun at them wouldn’t want to hang around. Other bushrangers had reasons for killing, but Dan Morgan might shoot someone just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The price on his head, which had already gone up to 500 pounds, doubled to 1000 pounds.

Morgan’s next victim was a senior police sergeant called Thomas Smyth. He was killed in September 1864. By now Mad Dan’s time was nearly up. He managed to commit plenty of robberies both in New South Wales and Victoria over the next few months, but his last hold-up happened on 8 April 1865.

Morgan raided Peechalba Station in Victoria. He held the family prisoner for the night. A nursemaid managed to escape. She warned the station’s part-owner, Rutherford, who sent for the police from the nearby town of Wangaratta.

The next day, Morgan headed for the stockyards to choose a horse, taking three hostages with him. The hostages weren’t much use to him, as a station employee called John Wendlan shot him from behind.

That was the end of Mad Dan Morgan – but not of his body.

First a photo was taken of his corpse, posed with his gun. Souvenir-hunters cut off his beard and long, curly hair. His face was skinned. His head was sent to the professor of anatomy at Melbourne University to be cut up and examined. What was left of him was buried at Wangaratta Cemetery.

Today, people are still arguing whether Ned Kelly was a hero or a villain, but nobody thinks there was anything heroic about Dan Morgan.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 2008, following the TV series ‘Underbelly’, which was about the Melbourne gang wars, eBay offered for sale two T-shirts supporting each side of the war – one for the Moran family, the other for Carl Williams’ gang.

FRANK GARDINER

AND THE EUGOWRA GOLD ROBBERY

I
n the 1860s, there was a gold rush in New South Wales, at Lambing Flat and Blackridge, near Forbes. Enough gold was being mined at Forbes to make it worth sending the treasure to Bathurst by coach every week. The coaches were escorted by armed guards, of course, but having a regular gold coach did make things easier for bushrangers.

The bushranger who decided to have a go at stealing the gold, in June 1862, was Frank Gardiner (real name Francis Christie), who had gathered a gang of seven for the purpose.

Did the heist work? Well, yes – and no.

The gang members weren’t professionals. They were cattlemen who did some robbery on the side. One of them, Ben Hall, would later become a full-time bushranger with his own gang. He would become even more famous than Gardiner.

Gardiner was a professional. On 15 June 1862, he and his gang held up some passing bullock drivers. He’d chosen a good spot, a gully called Eugowra Rocks, where the gold coach had to slow down, because the gully was steep and there were huge rocks to avoid.

Gardiner made sure that it was even harder for the coach. He parked the bullock drays across the road. One farmer had his young son, George Burgess, with him. George remembered the hold-up many years later, when he was the last survivor. The bullock drivers were not mistreated, though some were made to lie across the road. The rest were hidden and blindfolded.

As the stagecoach driver, Jack Fagan, was abusing the bullock drivers for getting in his way, Gardiner’s gang leapt out, shooting and yelling, ‘Bail up!’ The horses reared. The coach tipped over on its side.

Nobody was paying Fagan and the four troopers with him to get killed, so they very sensibly ran off into the bush, towards Eugowra homestead.

The gang took money and gold from the coach. They released their prisoners and shared some drink from the coach. The delighted child, George Burgess, was given a pound – enough money, he wrote later, to make himself sick on lollies for two weeks!

It was the largest gold robbery in Australia’s history. There was about $2 million worth of gold in today’s money.

Unfortunately for Gardiner’s gang, Jack Fagan and the troopers hadn’t been wasting their time when they ran. They told the owner of Eugowra homestead, Hanbury Clements, what had happened. Clements rode off to Forbes to tell the police.

Constables, with the help of an Aboriginal tracker, managed to follow the bushrangers towards Gardiner’s camp in Wheogo. The camp had a good view of the area, so the bushrangers could see who was coming.

They escaped, but really couldn’t take all that gold on one horse, which was tired. Most of the gold had to be left behind. Gardiner and Ben Hall managed to hang on to their share of the treasure, but everyone else had to make do with the money.

Gardiner got as far as Queensland with his partner, Kitty. There, they lived at Apis Creek near Rockhampton, running a store till 1864, when a tip-off sent the police after him. He was arrested and sentenced to 32 years at hard labour, but he was lucky. His sisters appealed successfully and after only ten years in prison, Frank Gardiner was released.

There was only one condition: he had to leave Australia for good. As far as we know, he is the only Australian ever to be exiled.

Gardiner wasn’t going to argue with a chance to be free. He went to Hong Kong for a while, then, in 1874, on to America. There, in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast area, he settled down to life as a saloon keeper. He called his saloon the Twilight Star. He probably had children there – two of his American sons may have visited Australia in 1911.

We don’t know for sure what happened to Gardiner himself, for in 1906 there was a destructive earthquake in San Francisco, which wiped out a lot of information about the later part of his life. But he probably died of pneumonia in 1904.

What happened to the gold? Did he spend it before he left Australia? Did he hide it? Did it come in handy in California?

We may never know.

DID YOU KNOW…?

If you were a woman in England in the early 1800s, you had to be very careful not to commit any crime. The population of the convict settlement in Australia was six men for every woman. In order to get some male/female balance and keep the men from going crazy, the British government changed laws to make it easier to transport women than men.

MARY ANN BUGG

SHE DID IT FOR LOVE

I
t has often been said that behind every great man is a great woman. Sometimes there has also been a great woman behind a criminal. And there is no doubt that the woman behind the bushranger Fred Ward, known as Captain Thunderbolt, was brave and strong and that he wouldn’t have survived without her and her knowledge of the bush.

Mary Ann Bugg was born in New South Wales, the daughter of a former convict called James Bugg and an Aboriginal woman called Charlotte. Charlotte taught her daughter how to live in the bush. This knowledge helped Mary Ann and her husband survive when they were on the run.

When Mary Ann was ten, she was sent away to boarding school, where she learned to read and write and other things that young ladies were expected to know. By the time she was fourteen, Mary Ann had married her first husband, a shepherd called Edmund Baker. Mary Ann and Edmund went to live in a place called Mudgee, where they worked on a property owned by a lady called Mrs Garbutt.

Mrs Garbutt’s son, James, had no problem about stealing other people’s cattle and horses. His partner in crime was a cattle thief called Frederick Ward, the future Captain Thunderbolt. In 1856, the two men were caught receiving stolen horses and sentenced to ten years in Cockatoo Island prison. They ended up only serving four years before they were released. While they were in prison, Mary Ann’s husband, Edmund Baker, died. When James and Frederick returned, Mary Ann was a widow with a young child. She had no reason to stay on the Garbutts’ cattle station, so she left with Frederick.

Unfortunately, Frederick just couldn’t stop stealing and in October 1861, he was back on Cockatoo Island for stealing horses, while Mary Ann gave birth to their first child, a little girl called Marina.

Mary Ann wasn’t going to let her husband stay in prison any longer than she could help. She had to wait until she had finished breast feeding her daughter, but then she left both children with someone who could look after them for a while. Mary Ann got a job as a housemaid in Balmain, which was near Cockatoo Island. She was careful to use a false name, calling herself Louisa Mason.

The story goes that she swam to Cockatoo Island with a file, so that Frederick could use it to cut off his chains. Is it true? We don’t know, but it’s a good story. Regardless, Fred did escape in September 1863, and they moved to the Hunter Valley, where Fred’s life as a bushranger began. Oh, and the children went with them. In fact, the couple had another one. Captain Thunderbolt never really had a gang. Sometimes, he would take on a partner for a while, but mostly acted on his own.

Mary Ann had two useful skills. She could find food and shelter in the bush and she had been educated in a girls’ school. That meant she could go into town to find out what the police were doing, or get supplies. Nobody suspected this attractive, ladylike woman.

She was arrested a number of times, though, for small crimes, and once served three months before being released. After this, she stayed out of trouble for the sake of her children.

We don’t know exactly what happened to Mary Ann. She probably died of pneumonia, after returning to her husband for a while. One night in 1869, Fred approached a woman called Mrs Bradford and asked her to look after a dying woman. Mrs Bradford took her in, but Mary Ann died that same night. The name the newspapers gave the dead woman was Louisa Mason, Mary Ann’s fake name from Balmain.

Whatever did happen, she had lived the life she wanted to live, with the man she loved.

DID YOU KNOW…?

Australia’s first architect was a convict. In 1814, Francis Greenaway was transported to Australia for fourteen years for forgery. He didn’t have to work on any chain gangs, though. Governor Macquarie let him set up a business and he was pardoned in 1818, after he’d designed the Macquarie Lighthouse. Greenaway designed a lot of Sydney’s most important buildings, which are still around today. Unfortunately, after Macquarie left in 1822, Greenaway was sacked from his job, due to government spending cutbacks. He refused to leave his government house, and lived there till he died in 1837.